Robert Campbell

Nicky, Have you read what is under discussion here: Leonard Peikoff's book Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand? Could it be that you've found Dr. Peikoff's book "long and pointless"? Robert Campbell

Plasmatic, Here are a couple of things I've written about the importance of emergence and its relevance to conceptions of knowledge. Campbell, R. L., & Bickhard, M. H. (1987). A deconstruction of Fodor's anticonstructivism. Human Development, 30, 48-59. Campbell, R. L. (1998). Representation by correspondence: An inadequate conception of knowledge for artificial systems. In G. Antoniou & J. Slaney (Eds.), Advanced topics in artificial intelligence (pp. 15-26). Berlin: Springer-Verlag. I don't currently have PDFs for these on my website. But it's time I did some upgrading. I will make them available in a week or so. Robert Campbell

Plasmatic, My issues with foundationalism are rather different from any of those raised by Karl Popper. Mainly, they have to do with the metaphysics, or ontology, of knowledge and of mental processes. In particular, with whether knowledge is an irreducible primary, or something that emerges. Psychological ontology is not a well explored topic in Objectivist writings. Objectivism isn't dualistic. Various Objectivist writings reject eliminative reductionism and epiphenomenalism. After those are ruled out, it isn't clear whether there is a specific Objectivist position on the subject... Ayn Rand's ambivalence concerning biological evolution and her insistence, at least after 1968, that philosophy has priority over the special sciences appear to stand in the way of developing an emergentist conception within Objectivism. But nothing in my critique of the doctrine of the arbitrary assertion depends on any of this. Whether you consider all knowledge to be made of, or from, knowledge-elements—or you reject this conception of what knowledge is—you should still find Dr. Peikoff's doctrine unnecessary, on the one hand, and seriously confused, on the other. Robert Campbell

I took Leonard Peikoff not to be saying not just that the assertion is deliberate, but that its arbitrariness is deliberate. In other words, that in every case the asserter either knows that the assertion is arbitrary—or is acting in reckless disregard of such knowledge. Robert Campbell

Leonard Peikoff does occasionally refer to a person who says "you can't disprove it" or "it's beyond mere human comprehension." In my article I call this procedure mystification (see pp. 118-119). I think we can see why mystification is objectionable without needing to bring in the rest of Dr. Peikoff's apparatus. And in calling arbitrary assertions "brazen," he is implying that every arbitrary assertion is produced deliberately, whether it is accompanied by mystifying commentary or not. Robert Campbell

See my two previous comments, Nicky. Meanwhile, you have yet to bring anything to this discussion except arguments from intimidation. Robert Campbell

Bingo. In fact, those who adhere to Ayn Rand's prohibition on psychologizing should, if they are consistent, refrain from identifying any assertion as arbitrary, if their basis for so identifying it is any purported diagnosis of the asserter's thought processes. Although I questioned in my article how Leonard Peikoff could know that every arbitrary assertion is "brazen" and so forth, and I asked whether he would be guilty, by his own lights, of gross "psychologizing" (see p. 130), I didn't take it further because the notion of psychologizing raises its own difficulties—and I plan to write about them in a future article. By the way, when I asked about the status of any assertions that Leonard Peikoff has made or will make about Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem (pp. 111-112), I was pointing to some of the problems posed by the speaker-dependence of arbitrariness. What Dr. Peikoff has written (in The Ominous Parallels) or said (in his DIM lectures) about the Incompleteness Theorem appears to be the product of utter ignorance of the subject. But, of course, I don't know what Dr. Peikoff has studied or read, or failed to study or read, on this subject, nor am I familiar with his step-by-step process of arriving at his conclusions about it. Even less do I know whether Dr. Peikoff's apparent ignorance has been willful, reckless, or brazen. Am I entitled to conclude that Dr. Peikoff has asserted his statements arbitrarily? Sure looks like it. Robert Campbell

So far as I know, Ayn Rand considered "Jesus Christ is the son of God and savior of the world" to be a false statement. Whether she considered it an arbitrary assertion in Leonard Peikoff's sense, I have no idea. Nathaniel Branden was on record, in lectures and in his 1963 article, to the effect that this statement is false, and is asserted arbitrarily. With Leonard Peikoff, take your pick. If you follow the reasoning presented in Chapter 1 of OPAR, you will conclude that the statement is false because it contradicts metaphysical axioms. If you accept the positions taken in Chapter 5 of OPAR, you will conclude that it is always asserted arbitrarily, and can therefore neither be true nor false. As has been the case throughout the discussion, Mr. Boydstun writes as though Dr. Peikoff was trying to solve problems formulated by Mr. Boydstun. The problems that Dr. Peikoff was actually trying to solve don't count. In my article, I pointed out a salient parallel in OPAR, between making an arbitrary assertion and choosing not to live. Both are wronger than wrong: one is falser than false and the other is worse than bad. If I am right about this, there are significant implications as to what problems Dr. Peikoff was trying to solve. For Mr. Boydstun, this is all belittlement of Leonard Peikoff; why else would anyone bring it up? I consider it fortunate that on OO Mr. Boydstun can't delete a thread during which I have commented on his position. Robert Campbell

The problems that Mr. Boydstun raises are real, and one of the proposed solutions is that propositions on the order of "The King of Texas drives a Cadillac" are neither true nor false. But they don't much overlap with the problems that Dr. Peikoff has aimed to solve with his doctrine. Some arbitrary assertions à la Pekoff are of propositions whose subjects fail to refer to anything real; e.g., "Gremlins are holding a conference on Venus." But none of Peikoff's treatments of the arbitrary that I have been able to locate ever mention cases like "The King of Texas drives a Cadillac." Peikoff does claim, of course, that arbitrary assertions are neither true nor false. But for Peikoff, propositions like "2 + 2 = 4" or "Ayn Rand had an affair with Nathaniel Branden" can be arbitrarily asserted—by people with insufficient knowledge or bad epistemic attitudes. In his 1974 lectures on Logic, Leonard Peikoff included a short discussion of Bertie Russell's theory of definite of descriptions. He rejected this in favor of a view rather like Strawson's, maintaining that "The present king of France is bald" is neither true nor false. He also characterized such propositions as "metaphysically meaningless" (to be differentiated from "epistemologically meaningless" or flat-out unintelligible). There is no mention of any of this in his 1976 lectures, or in any of his subsequent discussions of "the arbitrary." I don't even know whether Leonard Peikoff still subscribes to his 1974 position on "The King of Texas drives a Cadillac." It is not mentioned in OPAR, or in the latter-day lectures I am familiar with (but I am a long way from knowing all of them). When I started work on my article, I thought I would mention the 1974 discussion of meaninglessness, but quickly decided to leave it out, because I saw no indication that Dr. Peikoff considered it relevant to his views on "the arbitrary." Robert Campbell

Right. In Leonard Peikoff's presentation, an arbitrary assertion is not the same as an assertion that includes an invalid concept. It is also not the same as the assertion of a statement accepted on faith. In Nathaniel Branden's formulation (published in 1963, probably dating from the late 1950s), there was a tighter link between arbitrary assertions and appeals to faith. But Dr. Branden also thought that arbitrary assertions have a truth value (usually, they are false). Robert Campbell

It is evident that I have not been complying with Mr. Boydstun's agenda. Mr. Boydstun wants nothing to do with any substantive criticism of Objectivist writings, unless he was the author of it. Except for Mr. Boydstun, no one engages in substantive criticism; everyone is merely "belittling" and "running down." Mr. Boydstun further wants to pretend, in the face of considerable contrary evidence, that infighting in Rand-land proceeds no differently from infighting in most other places. He would like us all to believe that the infighters do no harm; only those who call them out on their behavior could do harm to Objectivism. Robert Campbell

Ayn Rand had a name for this sort of thing. It's an argument from intimidation. If you want to contribute to the present discussion, make an effort to produce a real argument. Robert Campbell

Very early in his career, Karl Popper tried to develop a theory of what we now call cognitive psychology. It was a failure—at least Popper quickly came to view it as such. (The last time I checked, his thesis on the subject had still not been translated into English. I don't read or speak German, so I'm not in a position to evaluate it.) That is the most plausible basis for his occasional polemics against "psychologism." What, precisely, is the connection between Popper's anti-psychological views and his claim that a testable universal hypothesis need not be highly probable? Robert Campbell

Two difficulties here. (1) It's not the doctrine of the arbitrary proposition—it's the doctrine of the arbitrary assertion. Arbitrariness is said to depend not merely on the proposition being asserted but on the person making the assertion. According to Dr. Peikoff, if you or I, knowing what we do of mathematics, assert the proposition "2 + 2 = 4," we assert it non-arbitrarily, and truly. But if a "savage," who, according to Dr. Peikoff, knows nothing whatsoever of mathematics, asserts what appears to be the exact same proposition, its assertion by him or her is arbitrary. (2) Many of Leonard Peikoff's examples of propositions asserted arbitrarily include concepts that he would consider arbitrary. For instance, any of his example assertions about gremlins doing one thing or another. But not all. Think about an example of an arbitrary assertion that he used in his Objectivism through Induction lecture. Where's the arbitrary concept in the assertion that "Harry Binswanger’s bachelor party consisted of a 3-hour seminar on Hegel’s Logic, beginning at 4 in the morning and conducted in his apartment"? Robert Campbell

Mnrchst, Here's a very quick answer: the doctrine of the arbitrary is internally inconsistent in several different ways, and Peikoff claims that all kinds of dire consequences flow from arbitrariness, while offering no clear criteria that a person could use to reliably identify it. Slightly less quick answer: An arbitrary assertion is supposed to be one that has been put forward without any evidence to support it. But Dr. Peikoff has never laid out much in the way of criteria of evidence, either in OPAR or elsehwere. And if you don't have a clear idea as to what constitutes evidence in support of asserting a proposition, how are you going to be able to identify those cases in which there is no evidence at all, therefore the proposition is being asserted arbitrarily? Yet Dr. Peikoff not only assumes that arbitrariness can be easily spotted without ambiguity, he writes with extraordinary confidence about all the awful consequences that must flow from ever making a single arbitrary assertion on any occasion. What's more, Dr. Peikoff claims in Chapter 1 of OPAR that certain propositions about the supernatural are contradictory, and are therefore asserted falsely. Yet in Chapter 5 of OPAR he claims that some of the very same propositions are asserted arbitrarily, therefore are effectively meaningless, therefore cannot be true or false. And the reader, having noted this contradiction, will only grow more confused as to which assertions are actually being made arbitrarily. Robert Campbell